Critical Guidance for Editing a Published Survey

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Understanding the Risks of Editing a Published Survey

Once your survey is published and responses start coming in, every edit carries risk. Even a small change can permanently erase or corrupt your data if you’re not careful. Some updates are completely safe, but others can wipe out everything you’ve collected so far. This guide explains exactly which changes you can make without harming your data and which changes you should avoid. Read this before editing a published survey.

Changes you make to your survey will not appear to respondents until you click Publish and complete the approval or republish process. After you publish, only people who start the survey after that point will see your updates.

Anyone who started the survey before you published will not see your changes. If you want them to see the updated version, they must start over.

  • If you sent the survey through email or a personal link, send those people a new link.
  • If you used the anonymous link, ask them to clear their browser cache, open a private/incognito window, or try a different browser to restart the survey.

Note: Any new edits you make will not go live until you publish again.

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Thorough Review Steps Before Releasing Your Survey

To reduce the risks associated with editing a survey after it’s published and data collection has begun, it’s important to conduct a thorough review beforehand. Below are several strong suggestions and key considerations to help ensure your survey is ready before it goes live.

  • Walk through the full survey in the preview link to identify broken logic, missing items, and unclear language.
  • Check the flow and timing to ensure the order makes sense and the survey doesn’t feel too long.
  • Test all skip and display logic by selecting different answer paths.
  • Use preview links to check the survey on a phone, tablet, and computer.
  • Verify embedded data, scoring, and recode values.
  • Review spelling, grammar, formatting, and any branding or look‑and‑feel settings.
  • Review the Guide to Creating Great Surveys and Forms for Iowans before finalizing your survey.
  • Review the ExpertReview results to identify issues and recommended improvements.
  • Confirm consent language and instructions are clear and easy to understand.
  • Submit test responses to confirm data appears correctly in reports.
  • Have a colleague perform a full peer review for anything you may have missed.
  • Select a comprehensive review in your approval process path.
  • Use Copilot or Gemini to fine‑tune your questions, simplify wording, confirm logic and forced responses, and clarify instructions.
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Safe Changes That Will Not Affect Your Data

The following edits will not delete previously gathered survey data:

  • Superficial text edits
    • Examples: Typos, extra spaces, updating punctuation or capitalization
  • Adding questions anywhere in the survey.
  • Adding choices to the end of a list of choices.

    • Warning: There is one important exception. Drill‑down questions cannot be edited once you’ve collected any responses. If you change the answer choices after collecting responses, all previously collected data will be invalid. This includes any preview or test responses.

      If you need to update a drill‑down question, you have two options:

      1. Make a copy of the survey and update the drill‑down there, so your existing data stays safe.
      2. Create a new drill‑down question with the updated choices and use display logic to hide the old one.
  • Rearranging the order of questions or of blocks in the survey flow.
  • Editing, adding, and removing recode values.
  • Editing, adding, and removing scoring.
  • Adding and removing branch logic, display logic, and skip logic.
  • Edits to the look and feel.
  • Adding new embedded data or embedded data from the contact list to the survey flow
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Changes That Will Delete or Damage Your Data

The following edits will delete or alter previously gathered survey data:

  • Changing the question type.
  • Enabling or disabling Autocomplete for text entry questions.
  • Modifying the response requirements or validation of a question.
  • Do not rearrange answer choices using Copy and Paste. Use Move Up or Move Down in the choice menu instead.
Qualtrics move up or down
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Additional Resources

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